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The more widespread use of body cameras will make it easier for the American public to better understand how police officers do their jobs and under what circumstances they feel that it is necessary to resort to deadly force.

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Tag: congressional budget office

The Student Aid and Fiscal Responsiblilty Act will probably be approved by the House of Representatives today, and to push it along the bill’s sponsor, Rep. George Miller (D-CA), makes clear for whom he is working:

First of all, do the voices of taxpayers not matter at all? You know, the folks who are going to foot the bill for all this largesse? Oh yeah – concentrated benefits, diffuse costs. And have students and their families really been trees falling in the wilderness with no one to hear them? With inflation-adjusted aid per full-time-equivalent student (table 3) rising from $4,454 in 1987 to $10,392 in 2007 – a 134 percent increase – it sure doesn’t seem so.

In fairness, the bill’s proponents have paid lip service to taxpayers, saying with straight and utterly deceptive faces that SAFRA won’t cost taxpayers a dime. The thing is, not only is this totally unsupportable according to several Congressional Budget Office analyses, it completely ingores that tax money is covering all of the costs of the bill. SAFRA would simply transfer taxpayer ducats from backing ostensibly private loans to loans directly from Washington, as well as lots of other federal expenditures.

And then there’s this: SAFRA supporters can talk all they want about helping students and families, but increasing grants and loans ultimately just hurts college-goers. Why? Because colleges and universities raise their prices to capture every additional penny of aid, as basic economics makes clear they would. So the only people politicians are ultimately helping are colleges, and by appearing to care ever so much about likely voters, themselves.

With the Student Aid and Fiscal Responsibility Act (SAFRA) likely to be voted on by the full House or Representatives today, the media is finally giving some space to debate over the bill. Unfortunately, the New York Timesonly pays attention to the parts it likes, writing in an editorial today that:

The private lenders and those who do their bidding in Congress have recently taken issue with a Congressional Budget Office analysis that showed that the bill would save about $87 billion over the next 10 years.

They argue, absurdly, for example, that the savings would be smaller if the system were analyzed under accounting rules other than the ones that the federal government is required to use. The aim is to mislead taxpayers and members of Congress into believing that the C.B.O. estimate is dishonest.

Um, excuse me New York Times, but the CBO has never said the bill – not just going from subsidized to direct lending, but the whole bill – would save $87 billion over ten years. Moreover, it has been a series of analyses from the CBO – albeit driven by requests from members of Congress – that have continually increased the cost estimates for SAFRA. (I have linked to all the CBO analyses here.) CBO’s very first estimate of the bill’s likely net cost put it at around $6 billion over ten years, and it only went up from there after incorporating such things as lending risk and potentially higher Pell grant costs.

Of course, the Times isn’t alone in its refusal to talk honestly about SAFRA. Despite all of the CBO estimates, yesterday U.S. Secretary of Education Arne Duncan said SAFRA would give college students and numerous other interests the world without costing taxpayers a dime. “We’re not asking the taxpayers for one single dollar,” he said. And SAFRA’s sponsor, Rep. George Miller (D-CA), has been touting his bill as a revolutionary money saver since day one.

The truth on this thing is out there, but it’s definitely not in the New York Times.

The biggest player in the health-care debate right now isn’t Nancy Pelosi, Harry Reid, or even President Obama. It’s the Congressional Budget Office, which is responsible for estimating the costs of proposed legislation. After the director of the CBO testified on July 16 that none of the health-reform bills in the House or Senate would reduce the rate of increase in federal spending on health care, congressional efforts fell into disarray. Many policymakers began searching for a way to get costs below the CBO’s frightening estimate of $1.1 trillion over ten years. Others attacked the CBO, calling its estimates irresponsible.

The CBO is actually being kind to the would-be reformers. Its analysis likely understates — by at least $1 trillion — the true costs of expanding health coverage as current Democratic legislation contemplates. Over the last few months, my colleagues and I at the consulting firm Health Systems Innovations have provided cost estimates of health-care reform to both Republican and Democratic members of Congress, and we’ve posted these estimates on our website as well. We believe that the Democratic bills currently under consideration in the House and Senate would cost $2.1 trillion and $2.4 trillion, respectively — much higher than CBO’s figures.

The discrepancies between our estimates and CBO’s stem from our different assumptions about a key issue. The Democratic plans envision a government-run insurance program, modeled after Medicare, that will compete with private insurers. How many people would opt for coverage under this public insurance? We believe that both large and small employers would have powerful incentives to shift their employees out of private coverage and into the public plan. Like the Urban Institute, we estimate that roughly 40 million people would make the shift. CBO seems to assume, however, that large employers would use the public plan only sparingly and that only 11 million people would move from private to public insurance — which would, of course, result in lower costs.

Why the difference in these estimates? We believe that we have better data on this issue than the CBO, which uses simulation models of health-insurance plans based on much older health-plan data — typically from 2001 or even 2000. Our estimates are grounded in 2006 commercial-insurance data to which the CBO doesn’t have access (the data are not publicly available and the CBO didn’t make provisions to purchase them). These data reflect the advent of much cheaper, high-deductible health plans and limited-provider network plans. If the government modeled its public option on these inexpensive plans, the result would be cheap enough to lure far more people away from private health insurance than the CBO estimates.

Yet another reason, as if another reason were necessary, for Congress not to hurry in voting to nationalize the health care system.

Here’s a blow to President Obama and Democrats pressing health care reform.

One of the main arguments made by the President and others for investing in health reform now is that it will save the federal government money in the long run by containing costs.

Turns out that may not be the case, according to Doug Elmendorf, director of the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office.

Answering questions from Democrat Kent Conrad of North Dakota at a hearing of the Senate Budget Committee today, Elmendorf said CBO does not see health care cost savings in either of the partisan Democratic bills currently in Congress.

Conrad: Dr. Elmendorf, I am going to really put you on the spot because we are in the middle of this health care debate, but it is critically important that we get this right. Everyone has said, virtually everyone, that bending the cost curve over time is critically important and one of the key goals of this entire effort. From what you have seen from the products of the committees that have reported, do you see a successful effort being mounted to bend the long-term cost curve?

Elmendorf: No, Mr. Chairman. In the legislation that has been reported we do not see the sort of fundamental changes that would be necessary to reduce the trajectory of federal health spending by a significant amount. And on the contrary, the legislation significantly expands the federal responsibility for health care costs.

The Heritage Foundation has a chart up on its blog, showing defense spending as a percentage of gross domestic product and declaring that “Obama plan cuts defense spending to pre-9/11 levels.”

This is a standard rhetorical device for defense hawks (see the Wall Street Journaleditorial page, Mitt Romney and lots of others) so it’s worth pointing out that it’s misleading. The unfortunate truth is that Obama is increasing non-war defense spending this year and seems likely to increase it at least by inflation in the near future.

It’s true that defense spending will probably decline as a percentage of GDP, assuming the economy recovers. But that’s because GDP grows. Ours is more than six times bigger than it was in 1950. Meanwhile, we spend more on defense in real, inflation adjusted terms, than we did then, at the height of the Cold War. The denoninator has grown faster than the numerator.

By saying that defense spending needs to grow with GDP to be “level,” you are arguing for an annual increase in defense spending without saying so directly. That’s the point, of course.

To be straight with readers, charts that show defense spending as a percentage of GDP should either show GDP growth over time or include a line that shows defense spending in real terms. Otherwise they fail to demonstrate that the decline in defense spending as a percentage of GDP is a consequence of growing GDP, not lower spending.

Here’s a chart from the Congressional Budget Office’s report, “The Long Term Implications of the Current Defense Plans,” that does this.

The assumption in analysis like Heritage’s is that defense spending should be a function of economic growth, not enemies and strategies for defending against them. It’s easy to pointout that this is strategically and fiscally foolish. And it’s worth noting, as I have onmanyoccasions, that we face a benign threat environment and can cut defense spending massively as a result.

But there is something weirder going on here that warrants mention. Arguing that wealth creation should drive defense spending is to attempt to divorce the military from its strategic rationale. That’s an implicit acknowledgement that defense spending is not for safety. High military spending in this worldview is either an end in itself or a partisan or cultural tool. That’s not much of a revelation, I guess.

The Census Bureau estimates that the number of uninsured amounts to 45.7 million people. But the agency might be over-counting by millions due to faulty assumptions…

Even though legislation won’t cover many of them, illegal immigrants are especially difficult to enumerate: Few raise their hands to be counted. Prof. [Jonathan] Gruber estimates they make up about 13% of the uninsured today, or nearly six million people of that 45 million number…

Of the rest, some people are eligible for health insurance but don’t know it and many can afford it but don’t want it. About 43% of uninsured nonelderly adults have incomes greater than 2.5 times the poverty level, according to a report released Tuesday by the business-backed Employment Policies Institute.

He left out a few things, though.

The estimate of 46 million uninsured, which comes from a less-than-ideal government survey, has been the occasion of a fraud on the public. For 20 years, the Church of Universal Coverage told us that 40-some million Americans are uninsured for the entire year. Then, experts including the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office said that no, 40-some million is the number who are uninsured on any given day, and a lot of those people quickly regain coverage. The number of Americans who are uninsured for the entire year is actually 20-30 million. Yet the Church of Universal Coverage kept using that 40-some million estimate as if nothing had happened – even though the meaning of that estimate had completely changed.

The Congressional Budget Office also reports that as many as 15 percent of those 20-30 million chronically “uninsured” are eligible for government programs, so they’re effectively insured.

According to economists Mark Pauly of the University of Pennsylvania and Kate Bundorf of Stanford, as many as three-quarters of the uninsured could afford coverage but choose not to purchase it. Again, according to the Congressional Budget Office, 60 percent of the uninsured are under age 35, and 86 percent are in good-to-excellent health.

Government intervention has made health insurance unnecessarily expensive for them, so these folks quite sensibly don’t want to be ripped off. Mandating that they buy coverage is really about hunting them down and taxing them.

It appears that the Obama administration has decided to disown the venerable Senator. No wonder. The Congressional Budget Office estimated the ten-year cost of Sen. Kennedy’s bill at $1 trillion, but admitted that its analysis was incomplete.

The Senate Committee on Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) have proposed a health reform bill called the Affordable Health Choice Act (AHC) that seeks to reduce the number of uninsured and increase health system efficiency and quality. The draft legislation was introduced on June 9th, 2009. The proposal provided adequate information to suggest what the impact would be of AHC using the ARCOLA™ simulation model. AHC would include an individual mandate as well as a pay or plan provision. In addition, it would include a means-tested subsidy with premium supports available for those up to 500% of the federal poverty level. Public plan options in three tiers: Gold, Silver and Bronze are proposed in a structure similar to that of the Massachusetts Connector, except that it is called The Gateway. These public plan options would contain costs by reimbursing providers up to 10% above current reimbursement rates. There is no mention of removing the tax exclusion associated with employer sponsored health insurance. There is also no mention of changes to Medicare and Medicaid, other than fraud prevention, that could provide cost-savings for the coverage expansion proposed. Below, we summarize the impact of the proposed plan in terms of the reduction on uninsured, the 2010 cost, as well as the ten year cost of the plan in 2010 dollars.

HELP Affordable Health Choices Act

Uninsurance is reduced by 99% to cover approximately 47,700,000 people

Health care reform would be serious business at any moment of time, but especially when the country faces $10 trillion in new debt over the next decade on top of the existing $11 trillion national debt. And with the $100 trillion Medicare/Social Security financial bomb lurking in the background, rushing to leap off the financial cliff with this sort of health care legislation would be utterly irresponsible.